Home Run

by Jenna Bennett

Five

  I read it. And then I read it again. And one more time for good measure. Through it all, Rafe just looked at me while Carrie gurgled in her car seat.

  Finally I lowered the piece of paper. I knew what it said. I understood all the words, but I didn’t feel like I’d quite grasped the meaning.

  “She’s offering you a job.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “At the Columbia PD.”

  He nodded.

  “She wants us to move here. That’s how she’s going to babysit Carrie.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up. “I don’t think that’s why she wants us to move here.”

  No. I’m sure it wasn’t. “She wants you to work for her.”

  He nodded.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  That was the question of the day, wasn’t it? The twenty million dollar question.

  And of course he threw it back at me. “You want me to?”

  “I want you to do what makes you happy,” I said. “You have a job you like. We have a place to live in Nashville.” A place that we’d started to think wasn’t the best place to be, perhaps, but a very nice house nonetheless. “I have a job.” Sort of. I didn’t make much money from it, and I’d thought about leaving anyway, after Carrie was born, since my annual dues were coming up for renewal in just a week, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it to keep going when I didn’t seem to be able to sell any houses to save my life. “We’re all right.”

  “But your family’s here. My grandma’s here now. Tammy’s gonna be here.”

  He’s the only person in the world who calls Tamara Grimaldi Tammy. I don’t know why she puts up with it, since she’s made it very clear that I’m not to call her that.

  Anyway, he had a point. Slowly, big parts of our lives were migrating to Sweetwater. Mrs. Jenkins last month, and now Grimaldi.

  But on the other hand…

  “David will be in Nashville.” And if we moved to Sweetwater, we’d see him less. “And Wendell. And the boys.” The three young men Rafe had been training in undercover procedure for the TBI.

  “They’re gonna go to work soon,” Rafe said. “I’m almost done with’em. We started in February. And Wendell’s been talking about retiring.”

  Wendell Craig was Rafe’s superior at the TBI. He’d been Rafe’s handler back when Rafe had been undercover. And he was getting on in age. He was probably pushing sixty, like my mother and Audrey. I could understand that he might be ready for a quieter life than the one he got being around Rafe and the three boys my husband had trained to be just like him.

  “Maybe he’d want to retire to Sweetwater.” I smiled optimistically.

  Rafe didn’t smile back. After a second, I pushed up from the velvet loveseat that’s been sitting in the parlor for the past hundred-plus years, and reached for the baby. “I’m going to take Carrie upstairs and feed her. She’s probably due for a diaper change and a nap, too. Why don’t you take the car out for a drive while I do?”

  “I have a better idea,” Rafe said. “Why don’t you feed and change the baby, and then we’ll put her in the car and let her sleep while we drive around?”

  Fine by me. However— “I thought maybe you’d like some time to yourself. To think about what to do.”

  He arched a brow. “Whatever I decide to do ain’t just gonna affect me, is it? It’s gonna have to be your decision too, right?”

  “I’ll go where you go,” I said. “If you want to stay in Nashville, I’ll stay in Nashville. If you want to come here, we’ll go here. If you want to move to the beach, we’ll move to the beach.”

  “Nobody’s offered me a job on the beach.”

  Perhaps not. But— “If you go to the beach and stand around in your swim trunks for a while—especially those small, gold Speedos you got for our honeymoon—I bet someone would offer you a job.” And in short order, too. It probably wouldn’t be law enforcement, but it’d be a job.

  He had no answer for that. Or maybe he just ignored the suggestion. Most likely he did. “Don’t you care what we do?”

  I thought about it. “I’m not sure I do. After I divorced Bradley,” my first husband, whom I married at twenty-three and divorced at twenty-five, “Mother wanted me to move back here, where she could pet me and coddle me and marry me off to Todd Satterfield. And I didn’t want that, so I stayed in Nashville. But things are different now. I’m married to you, so she can’t marry me off to Todd. Besides, she likes you. Going back here now wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be crawling home with my tail between my legs, licking my wounds. I’d be coming home with a husband and a baby, because I wanted to. Not because I didn’t have any other options, or because I couldn’t make it in the real world.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll take Carrie upstairs,” I said. “We’ll be ready to go in fifteen minutes or so. And since it’s after nine now, maybe you’d like to call the sheriff and make sure my mother’s all right.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “You should probably ask his opinion about this anyway, don’t you think? I mean, I know he offered the job to you first. He probably won’t mind if you go to work for Grimaldi.” In his county. “But it would be polite,” and politic, “to ask.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He reached for his phone. I picked up the baby and headed upstairs to deal with feeding and diapering.

  * * *

  When I came down twenty minutes later, he was off the phone and waiting in the foyer, already dressed and obviously eager to get going. “Are you sure you want me to come along for this?” I asked. “We’ll be just fine here. Carrie can nap and I can spend the time making myself presentable for dinner.”

  It took more effort these days. Just covering the circles under my eyes before I ventured out in public was a major production number.

  He gave me a look. “You don’t need four hours to do that. And anyway, I want you to come with me.”

  In that case, I guessed I didn’t have a choice.

  “Thank you,” I said as he held the door for me. While I’d been upstairs, he’d also gotten the Volvo out of the garage—the old carriage house—and had it purring at the bottom of the steps, already toasty warm. We buckled Carrie’s car seat into the back and then he handed me into the front seat.

  “All right?”

  I nodded. I could buckle my own seatbelt, and did, as he made his way around the front of the car over to the driver’s seat.

  “So where are we headed?” I asked when we were rolling down the driveway toward the Columbia Road.

  He glanced over. “Just taking a look around.”

  OK, then. “Did you get hold of Bob? Is my mother OK?”

  “Your mother’s fine.” He made the turn out of the driveway and onto the road. South. In the direction of, among other things, Sweetwater proper and the Bog, where Rafe had grown up. “Still at his house.”

  “Did they oversleep, or something?”

  “Something,” Rafe said.

  Right. “Well, I’m glad she’s all right. Did you tell Bob about Grimaldi’s offer?”

  He grunted. I took it as an affirmative.

  “What did he say?”

  “That she’d asked his opinion, and he told her to do it.”

  He must approve of the idea, then. Yet another example of how far we’d come. A year ago, the sheriff had still been a bit suspicious of Rafe. A year and a half ago, he’d been convinced that Rafe was guilty of murder. Before that, he’d been happy to blame him—Rafe—for anything that went wrong in Maury County.

  And now he was recommending that Grimaldi hire Rafe for the Columbia PD. Just goes to show it really is possible to teach an old dog new tricks.

  “So he thinks you should say yes?”

  He hesitated. “He didn’t go that far. Just told me he thought it might be time we both came home.”

  I arched a brow. Or tried. As usual, they both slid up. “Interesting.”

  Rafe shrugged. In the backseat, Carrie’s eyelids got heavier
and heavier. Her head tilted to the side and a drop of drool appeared at the corner of her mouth.

  “She’s going to sleep,” I whispered. Rafe glanced at her in the rearview mirror and nodded.

  We drove in silence for a minute.

  “Did he say anything else?” I asked softly.

  He shook his head. “Not about that.”

  “About what?”

  He hesitated. “He told me Sat… Todd proposed to Marley Cartwright this morning.”

  No kidding. “Did she say yes?”

  Rafe nodded.

  “Good for Todd,” I said. “Although I’m not sure he deserves her. He tried to prosecute her for murder once, after all.” I wasn’t sure I would have been able to forgive that. Not enough to actually marry the man who thought I’d killed my baby and hidden the remains. Even if he’d changed his mind later. After the baby showed up, whole and healthy.

  Rafe’s lips twitched. “He musta groveled well.”

  No doubt. “Well, I’m happy for them. I like Marley. And if Todd makes her happy, then I want her to have him.”

  He glanced at me. “No regrets?”

  About not marrying Todd? When I had him and Carrie? “Not a one,” I said, as the Volvo turned off the road onto the rutted track that led down into the woods to what used to be the Bog.

  There wasn’t much left of the trailer park where Rafe had grown up. All the mobile homes had been towed away, and the few clapboard shacks had been razed. A real estate developer named Ronnie Burke had bought the land and was going to build houses here, in the bend of the Duck River. The big sign with Future Home of Mallard Meadows—Homes from the $180s, was still there, but looked a little worse for wear. Ronnie had been in prison for more than six months now.

  Rafe stopped the car, and we sat in silence for a minute, looking at the wasteland that had once been the Bog. Here and there, a plastic flag flapped in the breeze from a stake. Other than that, it was just a bare patch of dirty ground. There wasn’t even any indication left that this had once been a community. A poor and somewhat pitiful community, but a community nonetheless.

  And then Rafe put the car in reverse and backed up the track to the road.

  “Shades of Christmas past?” I suggested, trying to keep my tone light.

  He shrugged. “Christmas wasn’t much different from any other day of the year when I was growing up. We never had any extra money, and it wasn’t like Old Jim woulda spent any of it on me, anyway. The only good thing about it was that he mostly passed out earlier than usual, and gave the rest of us some peace.”

  He reached the road and headed back toward town.

  “Any particular reason you wanted to come here?” It wasn’t to remember the good times, obviously.

  “Just thinking.”

  After a second he added, “What are the chances that the good folks of Maury County would welcome me back home, d’you think?”

  “Pretty good,” I said, “I would guess. A lot of them showed up for our wedding. And none of them threw rotten tomatoes at you.”

  “I figure the ones that woulda done that prob’ly didn’t show up to see me get hitched.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” I said. “I mean, what could have been better than seeing you get fitted with the old ball and chain?”

  The corner of his mouth that I could see curved up. “That’s a point.”

  Perhaps. But he had one, too. The citizens of Sweetwater, if not the rest of the county, were conditioned to see Rafe as a troublemaker. If he suddenly showed up as the long arm of the law, what were the chances they’d accept him that way? And respect him?

  On the other hand—and not to toot my own horn too loudly—marrying me had helped a little with that bad reputation, I imagined. If the Martins accepted him, and thought he was good enough for their youngest daughter, maybe he wasn’t as bad as people had thought. And now he was related to Audrey, too. His grandmother was living with her. And people respected Audrey. She’d been an upstanding citizen, and a successful business owner, in Sweetwater longer than I’d been alive.

  Clearly the sheriff respected him. He’d called him in to consult and work together on a couple of different cases. And he was dating Rafe’s mother-in-law. Add all of that together, and maybe a move to Maury County would work out all right.

  “It’s going to have to be up to you,” I told him. “I’ll go where you go. I’ll stand behind you. Or in front of you. Or next to you. Wherever you want me. And it isn’t like it’s a prison sentence, after all. If it doesn’t work out, we can go back to Nashville. Or move to the beach. Or go anywhere else we want to go.”

  He nodded. “I’m still not sure.”

  “That’s OK. I’m not pushing for you to say yes. I could be happy moving back home and being around my family more. Especially now, with Carrie. And I think you’d probably enjoy seeing your grandmother more. She seems to be settling in well here. Audrey says she isn’t trying to run away at all.”

  If I haven’t mentioned it, Mrs. Jenkins is in the early stages of dementia. She doesn’t always know where she is, or who we are. But last month, she had moved down here to Sweetwater, to live with Audrey, her sister Oneida’s daughter, and according to Audrey it was working out well. Mrs. J had settled right into living in Sweetwater. It was one more good reason to be here.

  “Just take your time,” I told Rafe. “If we’re going to do this, I want you to be sure. I don’t want you to feel like I’m pushing you. If you want the job, I think you should take it. If you’re not sure, then don’t.”

  After a second, I added, “Anyway, I’m sure Grimaldi understands that it’s a big decision. And if you’re not ready to make it now, but three months from now—or a year from now—you think you might like to give a try, I’m sure she’ll be happy to have you then.”

  Rafe nodded, and pulled the car into the parking lot behind the Oak Street Cemetery. “I’ll keep the car running. You stay here with the baby. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  “Take your time,” I said, and settled into the seat and watched him head up the hill toward his mother’s grave. “We’ll be right here when you get back.”

  Six

  We got to Catherine and Jonathan’s house in plenty of time for the festivities.

  They live in a subdivision on the outskirts of town, in one of the new McMansions that have cropped up like mushrooms over the past ten years. And they’re very nice, don’t get me wrong. All open and airy, with plumbing that works and floors that don’t slope and windows that don’t let in drafts strong enough to make the curtains move.

  I grew up in an old house, of course. Sloping floors and drafts and faulty plumbing is part of the charm. The mansion was finished right around 1840. Rafe’s grandmother’s house is a Victorian from the 1880s. Between those two, I spent two years in Bradley’s townhouse in Green Hills, and two more in a small one-bedroom apartment in East Nashville. That’s where I lived when I met Rafe again.

  If we moved to Sweetwater, would we have to live in a McMansion? Something new, without the personality of the houses I preferred?

  I looked around the foyer and tried to imagine myself living there.

  “Something wrong?” Catherine asked. She’d come to the door to relieve us of our coats. “You’re wrinkling your nose. Does something smell bad?”

  Not at all. The house was redolent of roasting meat and baked goods, and things like pine trees and oranges.

  I shook my head. “Just thinking.”

  Rafe hadn’t let me know that he wanted the job offer from Grimaldi to be a secret, so I added, “Tamara Grimaldi offered Rafe a job working for the Columbia PD.”

  Catherine’s brows rose. She turned to him. He shrugged. “I’ll take the baby in.” He picked up the car seat.

  “Everyone’s in the family room,” Catherine told him. “Straight through the dining room to the back. Except the kids. They’re upstairs.”

  Carrie was too small to join them, so a non-issue for us. Until nex
t year, when she’d be moving under her own steam. Crawling, if not walking. I pictured her pitching headfirst over the edge of the staircase and rolling to the bottom, and winced.

  Rafe passed out of the foyer with the baby carrier, and Catherine turned to me. “You OK?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  She glanced at the doorway where Rafe had disappeared. “Is he OK?”

  “He’s fine, too. Thinking about it.”

  She tucked her arm through mine. “It would be nice to have you back home.”

  It would be nice to be back home. I’d gotten over my need to be independent. Or to prove I was independent. I was ready to have family around me again. These last couple of weeks in Nashville, with a newborn and with Rafe at work all day, had reminded me how nice it is to be surrounded by people who love you, and who pitch in to help when you need it.

  “Anything I can do to nudge him in the right direction?” Catherine asked as we headed for the family room.

  “You mean in the direction of Sweetwater?” I shook my head. “It has to be his decision. I don’t want him to do it because he thinks I want him to. I mean, I realize that that’ll play into it...”

  “And should,” Catherine nodded. “You’re his wife. What you want matters, too.”

  “But not more than what he wants. I think he’s tempted. Since we had Carrie, we’ve both realized that where we live in Nashville, maybe isn’t the best place to be. And with his grandmother down here now, and with Grimaldi moving, and the boys he’s been training for the TBI finishing training and going on to do actual work… it might be a good time to make a change.”

  Catherine nodded. “I’ll be happy to give him my opinion if you want.”

  “If he asks,” I said. “Otherwise, just keep it to yourself.”

  She made a face but didn’t say anything else as we passed through the beautifully decorated dining room and into the family room.

  The whole gang was there, or so it seemed. It wasn’t until I’d looked around the room, at all the familiar faces, that I realized that no, we were still missing some people.